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New St. David’s Foundation leader selected at pivotal time

New St. David’s Foundation leader selected at pivotal time

William Buster is the next vice president of community investments at the St. David’s Foundation.

Story Highlights

William Buster arrives in Austin after working for the $8 billion W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Michigan.

The foundation expects to give out more than $75 million in the five-county region it serves in 2017.

The announcement of William Buster to oversee the St. David’s Foundation’s grant-making work marks a milestone in Austin philanthropy. Not only does he replace the influential Bobbie Barker, but he also takes on the role as the foundation has become the largest grant-maker in Central Texas.

“I kind of feel like the dog that caught the car,” said Buster, who is new to Austin and comes from the $8 billion W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Michigan. “For me to come into this space is humbling and exciting.”

But Buster, 46, also takes the role at a time when health disparities in Central Texas are in the spotlight. Recent studies show that income and education disparities link directly to health disparities, and, in fact, the foundation’s own 2016 assessment found that black and Hispanic people, women, seniors and the LGBT community suffer health issues at a higher rate than their counterparts.

With a goal of making Central Texas “the healthiest community in the world,” the St. David’s Foundation crafted a strategy that adds new target issues, including childhood adversity, housing services, insurance enrollment, health in rural communities, teen pregnancy prevention and women’s health.

“If I had to think about what our emphasis will be, it would be in helping those most vulnerable in our community have timely, affordable access to health care and helping those target populations who are dealing with specific health disparity issues,” Buster said.

The St. David’s Foundation might just be able to do it. Among the nonprofit health care service providers it has helped finance include the People’s Community Clinic, Lone Star Circle of Care and Austin Travis County Integral Care, which provide care to vulnerable populations. While its rival hospital system, Seton, participates in philanthropy by providing indigent care through the Dell Seton Medical Center, proceeds from St. David’s HealthCare fund the foundation, which then distributes it money in the form of grants to health-related nonprofit services and projects.

In 2010, the foundation’s grants totaled $27 million, but in 2017 it expects to give more than $75 million in the five-county region it serves. Today it’s one of the five largest health foundations in the country. In fact, Buster says the size of the foundation’s grant funding was a surprise. “I found it hard to believe at first,” he said. “In 17 years in philanthropy in this part of the country, I got to know about the big ones, but I had never heard of it. I found it interesting to have this amount of resources in a small, five-county space.”

Buster’s experience working within larger foundations with a bigger impact area is part of why he was selected. In hiring him to replace Barker as executive vice president of community investments, Barker said, “William brings many years of large foundation experience and he is well-connected nationally in the world of philanthropy. With that, he will bring fresh ideas and a spotlight to the work in Central Texas.”

Buster’s work in other parts of the country made him a hot prospect when he announced he was ready to move on from the Kellogg Foundation. “I wanted to stay on through the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina,” he said of the devastating 2005 storm that hit the Gulf Coast. “I’d done so much work supporting a lot of the rebuilding efforts, helping to rebuild the nonprofit infrastructure, helping renew small business and really helping to advance racial healing and racial equity.”

Growing up in a farming community in North Carolina made him attuned to the needs of agriculture, and his early work in philanthropy found him helping small farmers become more successful. Later, he was appointed by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to the Minority Farmer Advisory Committee to advise the Agriculture Department on implementation of outreach and assistance efforts to socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers.

He’s also proud of his role in working with the Obama White House in the development of the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative. And he advised the Ferguson Commission on strategies to promote and include racial equity and racial healing after the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown outside St. Louis.

But in choosing to move his young family to Austin, where he’d never been before being contacted about the St. David’s Foundation job, he says he was convinced on his first visit that this was his next home.

“I noticed things about infrastructure and the way city is set up,” he said. “I saw bike lanes. I saw parks. In certain parts of town, I saw lots of people of color. But given where I’ve done work in Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, Atlanta and New Orleans, even the poorest parts of Austin were not like those places. There was more care-taking here. That was interesting to me.”

He says he was also surprised by Austin’s willingness to learn. Everyone he talked to seemed excited to hear how other cities were dealing with the same social issues, he said. “That’s something you don’t see in a lot of other places. I see people who care about this community and are really struggling to solve these issues. And they’re willing to struggle with it. That’s rare.”

The combination makes for a unique testing ground, he said.

“St. David’s Foundation has a unique position. Federal, state and local resources are not as malleable in addressing these issues. So our intent is to experiment, measure and then identify best practices. We have to be in a position to lead, leverage and partner. So the big question for us is, ‘What are we going to lead?’” he said.

Giving City Austin

This article is published through a partnership with Giving City Austin, which reports on the area’s nonprofit community. Read more Giving City stories at GivingCityAustin.com